Blog Comments & Posts

Edwin, i've just read your analysis regarding the Adwords campaign for ElectricBicycles. The differences are pretty impressive. I can confirm that the same happens for recruitment, and in general on B2C markets.

And Edwin, let's not forget, once developing an EMD, you're getting so much more than just SEO advantages. I had a Belgian customer which acquired an EMD for a fleet management company. His brand went viral. Half of potential customers perceived him as the market maker, and the national awareness was great.

In my opinion, this analysis is firstly incomplete, and secondly biased.

EMD do not provide unfair advantages. And they are not strictly acquired as a SEO strategy. An EMD can be easily remembered, has a psychological trigger, and in most cases, provides trust.

Frequently the price tag associated to an EMD is a powerful barrier to entry. Therefore the probability of "burning" the domain name with spam or a poor marketing strategy is much lower.

An EMD per se does not provide such enormous advantages. The anchor text usage, does.

There is often a strong association between the brand image, and the domain name. About.com is a great example. SeoBook is another one. In these cases, the brand raised the actual awareness regarding the query. It also converted an informational query into a transactional one. We all know as a fact that using the name of your competitors as a ranking strategy is illegal. Disregarding EMDs can be seen as a way of eroding the brand image of established players, legitimizing the act of using their TMs, in an indirect way.

EMDs are memorable and elegant. That's the human nature. We're more likely to remember homes.com than premiumhomes.com. Search tends to become more natural. Why would it suddenly turn 180 degrees?

Over-stressing the disadvantages of EMDs, while omitting fundamental advantages is, in my opinion, a proof of badwill.

Last but not least, you're saying that "other sites spend a lot of time on SEO" and they should not have disadvantages. Time is just an input, a prima facie factor. Time cannot be used by itself, to quantify performance. A BMW is not better than a Chevrolet simply because the engineers spent more time on actually making it. It's all about the brand, the trust in their work, in their commitment for quality.

You're also claiming that selling or renting an EMD is not ethical. I wonder if you consider that selling an optimised website is. By extrapolating your statements, I can logically deduct that selling or renting assets is illegal or not ethical.

PS. The people "spending a lot of time on SEO" are disadvantaged by EMDs you say. What about the "people which write extraordinary content" which is not SEOed? Aren't they disadvantaged? What about the graphical designers that are disadvantaged by the fact that OCR is not fully implemented or by the fact that Google cannot detect which painting is more relevant (other than using trust or text based signals). What about the extraordinary Flash designers around, that are being promised (in vain) since (well...always) that flash will become fully crawlable? Aren't they disadvantaged?